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Even so, the Lord never leaves Himself without witnesses.
In the 1700s in Germany, a community of religious refugees from Moravia (eastern Czechoslovakia) experienced a visitation of the Holy Spirit. They were already living a "life together" on the estate of Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, but one major upshot of their fresh Pentecost was a very powerful and new impetus and determination to pray night-and-day. These Moravians maintained and perpetuated their particular model for such intercession, uninterrupted for 100 years. And as with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Finkenwalde Community, their life of prayer was not a retreat, but a springboard into mission and Gospel engagement with the world.
So, truly there is "nothing new under the sun"...but there is "a river whose streams make glad the city of God" (Ps 46.4); its water "flows from the sanctuary"; "everything will live where the river goes"; and "on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food"; their "fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing". (Eze 47.1-12)
This River is the Holy Spirit of God. Whenever and wherever He uncommonly "surfaces" and breaks through into history, there have been Great Awakenings. He it was too who overtook and carried to their destiny as apostolic and prophetic intercessors, Benedict, Bernard, Teresa...and Dietrich also.
In these last of the Last Days, the River is to run with ever-increasing strength and at hitherto unimagined depths, sparking and birthing Great Awakenings unto prayer and salvation, "far more abundantly than all we ask or think...immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine". (Eph 3.20)
But here's the nub...and the rub!
(1) If we kowtow to post-modernist drivel and swallow the miserable falsehood that our spiritual fathers and mothers have nothing to teach us, then we (deservedly) condemn ourselves to a lifetime of fruitless experimentation and exhausting fad-chasing. We have to be humble enough to suck the marrow of proven experience from the bones of those venerable and awesome prayer-"engines" God built around our spiritual ancestors in their day. Thus we position ourselves for the "Spirit of supplication and intense prayer" to come and clothe us with the "machinery" that He has framed for today...the Last Day.
(2) And if we don't have the intestinal fortitude to leap by faith into "the everlasting arms", and trust the Spirit of truth to guide us "into all the truth" (Jn 16.13), then we shall be guilty of squatting in houses built and once occupied by others, and of mumbling dead men's prayers; we will definitely risk becoming "waterless clouds...fruitless trees in late autumn". (Jude 12)
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever, that if we so position ourselves (loving the contemplative traditions and today's immense, prophetic "unknown", equally) then we shall be enlightened and enabled to build God's final and ultimate House, which "shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples".
